Predicting Customer Needs with CRM (Part 2)

In my last article, I explored the importance of staying ahead of the game when it comes to sensing what your customer’s needs are, by predicting what they are. Because opportunities are ubiquitous, it is important to prepare yourself to act upon opportunities as soon as they come up so that you can fully capitalize on them with preparation on your side. If you can use your CRM to predict what your customer wants - you have the upper hand in being in a position to make the right choices to give them what they want, in the exact same way that predicting the weather can give you the upper hand when it comes to making the right choice as to whether or not to bring an umbrella.

Before, I had discussed how to come to these conclusions for an individual customer (e.g. anticipating what one specific customer will need next based on certain behaviour patterns) - but for this article, I’ll be touching upon how you can apply this principle to your customer base as a whole. Kind of like macroeconomics as opposed to microeconomics.

While determining what the “common interest” might be in your customer base might not exactly help you in landing one specific account, or closing one specific detail, this data has an abundance of utility when observing larger scale aspects of your sales strategy. Examples might include determining that you should push one product as opposed to another, and even how to properly word your sales letters and advertisements. This is the sort of work that marketing consultants charge thousands of dollars for - and is something you can do by yourself on your CRM, even while watching TV.

Let’s say you’ve accumulated various details in your CRM, to the point that you now know a reasonably in-depth quantity of detail about each of your customers; from various sources to include your own contributions, and things that other users of your CRM (such as the accounting department) might have added over time. You now have a centralized database where you can view your customer records at a glance, and then draw conclusions from them. This is where it gets exciting.

To put that practice into context, think of it this way… imagine having the business card of every client and lead you’ve been in contact with, laid out on the boardroom table for you to glance over, and observe patterns in this array. In doing so, you can notice such trends as “we seem to have a lot of contacts from this state” to “the bulk of our customers are either in the insurance industry or the investments industry”. The difference is that doing this in CRM doesn’t involve the laborious and perhaps frustrating task of laying out all those business cards; plus, you’ll have much more data to work with than the paltry amount contained on a business card.

From here, this is where your keen eye gets to work. Here are a few examples of some telling data types that might reveal some opportunities for you…

Date of last contact: If you notice that a good deal of your contacts haven’t been interacted with in months or years - and they’ve also only been interacted with once - and they also never bought anything - perhaps your sales strategy could encourage multiple contacts, to try and keep up interest.

Customer’s industry: If you classify your leads and contacts by industry, you can notice common ground between those in the same industry, to see if that says anything about how you should approach customers in this industry. If you have a lot of customers from one particular vertical that seem to be the ones who dropped your product the most - this could prompt research into how to better serve that market segment specifically.

Company size: Maybe most of your current customers have 5-10 employees. Those in your CRM that didn’t buy were mostly of 25+ employees. This should indicate that some work needs to be done, either on the product or the pitch, to address those of 25 employees or more.

Trends such as these could be hiding in your current data; and CRM can help you to identify them. Just as a spreadsheet better organizes your expenses than, say, a pile of expense receipts tied together with a rubber band, the CRM can concisely retain, organize and express your data in a way that you can make use of - but more importantly - in a way that makes sense to you in the interest of doing more, and better business.

Maxwell Arnold is a lifelong technology enthusiast and passionate follower of the telecom industry, with a focus on the UX (User Experience) aspect of any given technology. Email Maxwell at maxwell@maxwell.me.

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